A larp in the style of Agatha Christie

[breakinglight11]

I want to write a larp in the style of Agatha Christie. Not like, using Christie characters or anything— though you probably could do a very cool pastiche of her mysteries if you wanted to —but with a bunch of characters trapped in a place due to bad weather who all have terrible secrets and a murder happens. And the substance of the game is untangling everyone's purposes, desperate, nefarious, or otherwise. I'd probably want to combine her various usual reasons for gathering everyone together, because they are being blackmailed, punished, and trapped with a killer. Some would be guilty, some would be righteous, some would be some combination of the above, and all would be not what they seem.

This would work great set within my greater Mrs. Hawking-adjacent historical fiction universe— a setting I refer to as Breaking History. I love writing period pieces, and it would be equally easy to set it closer to my usual milieu of the long 19th Century as it would to use Christie's preferred settings of the early-to-mid 20th. I had fun when I was writing Brockhurst, my Downton Abbey-inspired game, including player characters who were references to other works. I had a rich landowning cowboy who was the grandson of characters from The Stand, set in California just after the Civil War. I had an uncle to one of the two protagonists from The Tailor at Loring's End, set in Connecticut of the 1930s. And I had none other than Beatrice and Reggie Hawking, Nathaniel's daughter and son, who have been mentioned in the plays as children and by that point in 1915 were adult investigators in their own right.

I could do the same for this new game. Hell, I even already have a few characters who are eminently perfect to be the victim of a blackmailer. And I love mysteries, murder and otherwise. It would be fun to make a large part of the game solving various nefarious things that happened. I mean, Agatha Christie novels are basically perfect larp set ups— they're a bunch of people with secrets locked in rooms they can't leave! I don't have a ton of time to devote to larp writing these days, but I miss it. And I've been looking for more things to do because I enjoy them, rather than because they're "good for my goals" in some way. I've been trying to decide on projects for the year, and maybe this is a possibility worth considering.

Comments

[valleyviolet]

I would love to see more mystery larps. I feel like historically mystery larps fall down because so many of the characters in a mystery are more NPC than PC. In Silver Lines you got away with actually using NPCs, which was great, but I think there is probably also a way to get away with something where players are filling multiple NPC-like rolls. It'd be weird, but people also enjoy horde games, so I'm betting there's a way to make it fun. :P

My husband and I toyed with the idea of doing an Murder on the Orient Express style game where the point was not solving the mystery, but sending most of the players through the rollercoaster emotional ride of being murders with very good justifications who were trying to avoid being caught... or at least trying to present themselves sympathetically enough to convince the detective to let them go. (We were going to have the player who played the victim come in as the Great Detective after the murder. So they would need to be steering like crazy.)

Anyhow... my impression is that you generally write alone, but if you happen to want help I would love to help you work on a mystery game. :)